Gill: The Forgotten Genre of Poetry

Summary: This article focused on the importance of poetry as a genre for reading and writing. Gill discussed that many teachers expect students to evaluate and decompose poetry written by authors, but forget to emphasize the meaning of poetry. He continues to give examples of how he incorporated poetry into his classroom by modeling and allowing students to write freely. Gill emphasized that poetry is a way for students to express themselves, their feelings, their experiences through written work. He also discussed that poetry is one of the least popular genres for children's literature and that teacher should pursue to pressure publishers to print books related to children's poetry instead of adult poetry. Children should be exposed to illustrated poetry books so that the genre is never forgotten.

This was important for me to read because my classroom incorporates poetry reading every week. The students are given a poem to study all week and are required to recite the poem Monday. The students are exposed to children's poetry on a daily basis that is both within the classroom and outside of the classroom. This article helped link the Writer's Workshop material I read to how I can incorporate that with poetry. I think it would be beneficial for my students to begin writing their own poetry in their notebooks to express themselves. This would be a way to incorporate productive Writer's Workshop that focuses on the students real life experiences and promotes the genre into writing techniques and not just reading and reciting someone else's work. As a professional, I need to identify what my students know about writing poetry. I need to make sure that my students know how to write poetry that focuses on events and feelings the reader can experience. Poetry can be a way for my students to begin a different aspect of writing and focus on how to incorporate feelings and desires into their writing.

This module has helped me to think about how I can use writing as a means of assessment during my unit development. The book that we will be using can and should incorporate reflection through writing. I notice now that I can have students participate in discussions of the book and allow them to write their feelings about a book through multiple writing techniques. The students should have the ability to experience more writing during literacy instruction instead of it all being reading, short answer, and unit assessment worksheets. I think that allowing the students to write a summary, alternate ending, poetry, etc as a assessment could benefit their success in assessment.